Guitars and Life

Another year has passed and yesterday was my birthday. So what booty did I receive? Both my kids bought me a couple of Blu-Ray films.  Spotlight, Jurassic World, Our Kind of Traitor and Eye In the Sky.  All films I never went to see at the cinema, frankly it is so expensive these days to go I partly would rather wait for the Blu-Ray to come out. Mrs F got me a Miloš Karadaglić CD - Aranjuez which has the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez on it - my (and many others I suspect) favourite guitar concerto.  Also a ticket to see him live this month at the Canterbury festival in an intimate venue with an orchestra.  Really looking forward to that! Oh and the most guitar related gift?  Big Bends Nut sauce.  Yes you read that right.  It is a lubricant for your nuts sir.  Guitar nuts.  Often considered for only vibrato guitars I suspect I'll actually like it more for some acoustic guitars where dropping in and out of altered tunings and ...

Some of my booty from the family. A new Fishman pickup which is destined for my Yamaha LL11, a really neat neck support from Crimson Guitars, Alter Bridge's new CD and Allsorts!!!

Can you believe it... another orbit has passed with Furtheron sat on this lump of rock going around a small star in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.  A year - is is funny that we get preoccupied with this stuff isn't it, we divide up things into seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years.  All of these are just to a point arbitary constructs we use to make sense of our planet and it's place in the cosmos if you think about it.  A day is only a day and a year only a year because of where we are in the solar system.  Anyhoo I've managed to sit here on the planet we call home for 51 of these orbits around the sun. Now if you want to really feel inconsequential in the scheme of things consider this.  The solar system is gracefully swinging around the centre of the galaxy at around about 514,000mph (puts any land speed record into context doesn't it!).  To complete an orbit like this known as the "Galactic Year" will take around 225million years ...

Regular long term readers of this blog may recall that my marvellous spouse and offspring bought me a weekend pass to the British Grand Prix back in October as my 50th birthday present.  Now people who read this blog will know I like motor racing, F1 in particular, back in the 80s when there were GPs at Brands Hatch, our local track, we'd regularly get up at 5am to be camped on South Bank by 7am and then sit in the car park as the sun set waiting for the nonsense of the 50 undisciplined lines of cars forcing themselves through one gate to exit.  I went to practice at Silverstone in 92 (I think) when Damon Hill forced an ugly handling Brabham onto the back of the grid.  The last GP I went to was the legendary European GP at Donnington in 1993 where it rained and rained and I witnessed Ayrton Senna's incredible drive to victory, that day he was unbelievable able to drive around as though there wasn't the 2 inches of water that there really was.  So 20 years since a phy...

I was about to blog about how I've been feeling the last couple of weeks and then thought - you know what you've said this before, and indeed I have .  So one of the advantages of a blog, diary or journal is that you can look back see patterns.  Clearly I have this pattern of a bit of a "low time" after my AA birthday, it is I presume the build up to that day then is passing and of course nothing really being any different just another day sober, which is itself always a minor miracle for someone like me in all honesty. Also it has been all a bit stressed in the house with Mrs F's Mum in hospital - she is making good progress, there is talk of her moving to a rehabilitation specialist place, a friend who knows this stuff well highly recommends it, so we hope that will be good and she'll get more mobile soon.  My wife posted a ghastly picture of her knee wound on Facebook last night - I'll spare you that it was horrible! Additionally the build-up to Son...

Well I obviously am! Yes somehow unbelievably it is 9 years since I took my last alcoholic drink.  If you want a brief summary of my drinking career read My Drinking Story .  Friday 14th May 2004 - I remember it well!  I was already in the pub, well it was a Friday and it was after noon after all, when Mrs F text me about something we'd been waiting on. "Tonight we can celebrate" said the text.  Of course my stupid brain looked at that and did the usual flip and a voice, one of my voices, said "But frankly your life is still shite pal. What a loser!".   That was it I went on one of my many regular drinking binges.  (There is a whole book worth of stuff around why I did that, about my lack of self-worth, my need for external gratification and acknowledgements but coupled with an internal knowledge that they were not enough anyway.  If you can't love yourself as you are you'll never be happy even if you win the biggest lottery win in the world!) I go...

Today is Mrs F's birthday, I'll not give her age away but... she'd not as old as me :-) We had a day out at Rye in East Sussex and the weather gods shone on us as it was overcast and cloudy as we headed there.  On arrival we climbed up into the town, the main old bit being a top a big hill with a castle and big church etc. and found a little tea shop - sadly our favourite one has changed hands and was full but we found another and ordered a light lunch.  When we came out the sun was shining and we had a lovely day pottering about the junk - sorry antique shops. For the guitar nuts the most ludicrous I found was a bolt on neck Epiphone SG with several scratch plate screws missing, replaced pickups (nothing special) and even one of those was missing a height adjustment screw.  So  a "fixer upper" you'd think.  Yes if it had been £50 - £60 but at £330 frankly purely a rip off.  In the same place a couple of years back I found a clearly totally fake Fender ...

That I popped into the world!  Happy birthday to me! The front room is full of cards - unusual I normally only get a few family ones - I should be 50 every year!  I've a finger drum kit from my brother!  Some CDs, loads of vouchers etc.  but one very special present.  Mrs and the kids have bought me a weekend pass to next years F1 GP at Silverstone!!!  How fantastic.  It has been years and years since I went to a GP so really overwhelmed with that actually and it is so good as it's ages away for the excitement to build. Finally the card from Mrs F was this box - hand made by a very clever friend of ours.  On the outside it is covered with music - took me a couple of minutes to figure out it was Voodoo Chile Slight Return by Mr Hendrix.  Open up to the inside and lyrics from Fantastic Place by the unsurpassable Marillion... How amazingly cool!

I turn 50 in just under 2 months.  But looking at the stats on the blog I have 50 followers, welcome to the 50th!  Also just gone through 50,000 page views. I read a couple of blog posts about loneliness today.  Interesting isn't it that we live in a world where we can all stay connect much better than we ever used to - we were trying to explain to the kids how my wife and I kept in touch when we were courting... er we met each other!  We did luckily have phones at home, we got one when I was about 16 I think - honestly up until then I'd have to use the pay phone over the road on the little green.  But it is interesting that I think loneliness is on the increase despite all this.  My daughter have 100s of "friends" on Facebook and Twitter - but truth is she doesn't know hardly any of them.  On here many people read and comment and I have a blog roll I visit, people I find interesting or we have a common bound, sometimes music, often recovery.  ...

You know how it is - there is a special thing coming up, there is the build-up, the anticipation of it, then the day is here the fanfare briefly sounds, there are smiles and all that and then, it is over and it is the next day, or the next and it all seems a long time ago and a bit of an anti-climax in retrospect.  And that is how I am a little bit at the moment - post "birthday" blues.  I remember having this big style on my 1st sobriety anniversary.  I was presented with my 1 year chip from my home group, another friend in the fellowship is a month or so younger than me in sobriety gave me a very precious gift that I was very touched by and then back to daily grind...  I then suddenly knew that I was off kilter, because?  Because I'd been up to then thinking back to the year before, my first year I kept thinking - oh this time last year I was... blah blah and I could see the change if not any growth.  The beginning of that second year was very hard for me...

Today is my 8th sobriety birthday.  I suppose different people have different definitions for that day - I know some for who it is the day they first had without a drink at the start of their recovery, for others the day they first attended AA.  For me it is actually the last day I ever drank. Here is an extract from the My Drinking Story page on this blog... ... (Mrs F and I) had some good news and my wife texted me a simple line "tonight we can celebrate". I saw that last word, considered this great news and thought - "My life is still utter shite" and I went off on an all day bender. At home that evening my long suffering wife instead of ignoring me finally bit back and we had the most almighty row which is not how our relationship functions - we don't row. In the middle of that with the swearing and threats etc. I gave up. I lay down and cried and cried. I just wanted it all to stop. That was the moment I made the decision that I had to do something dra...

The really observant of you all may have noticed a single character in my profile has changed.  An 8 and changed to a 9 - yes folks it is my birthday today and I've entered my fifth decade on this planet.  My daughter is constantly now reminding me that I have only one year until I'm 50, however I was thinking it funny that we actually count our ages as years past.  You are nought when born... funny you don't count money like that or houses... who lives a 0 Station Road?  If we counted years like money I'd be 50 already. An inevitable sign of my age is that I needed new glasses, the biggest problem the last years is reading I have to take them off to read then back on to look at the TV etc.  So I've got a pair of varifocals now.  I'll see how I get on with them but so far not too bad.   Although I get strange looks as I move my head about looking at things at the moment, I'm trying to figure out the best bit to look through for this or that. A...

I was off work for two whole days to celebrate my sons 21st birthday.  Thursday we went to the cabinet war rooms in London.  Very interesting place, actually the huge museum on Churchill's life was the biggest interest for me.  How can one man have done so much in his life?  He was instrumental in the introduction of some of major social reforms in this country - namely national insurance, state pensions and labour exchanges.  Then of course all the first world war stuff and of course the second world war... what an utterly amazing man. Lunch was at The Hard Rock Cafe... the original in London.  I was defeated by the huge portion that was piled on the plate!  We ended the day getting throughly ripped off by having a cup of tea/coffee in Harrods.  Mrs F is still mumbling about the £20 bill for the four of us.  We declined having scones which were over £8 each!!! Friday the crack decorating team of Mrs F and Son-of-Furtheron who had complet...

Finally the USA government have raised the debt ceiling - I have no idea if that is a good or a bad idea, frankly because I can't even get my head around the numbers.  It was raised by $2.4tn... tn?  Yes not m (million) not bn (billion) but a trillion.  What is a trillion?  It is 12 zeros.  12 zeros!!!  Let us write out that number long hand then... $2,400,000,000,000  The mind boggles I can't really cope with that the number is in my simple brains terms stonkingly big.  Oh note that was the incremental rise, i.e. that was how much extra they wanted to borrow.  Go to your bank and ask to raise your overdraft by that amount!!!  The new USA federal government debt is therefore now $16.7tn.  The mind boggles.  Frankly what the hell do they spend it on?  Trying to visualise this in my head led me to think the opposite about small things - say an atom.  (Dubious research note here - I got a lot of this info o...

Bad Company - first album, Moving On one of my favourite tracks of theirs however that isn't the point of this post... I can reveal that the life changing event alluded a post of two back is actually not that interesting... I've got a new job that is all. Just couldn't post that on here until those that needed to be told were told, not that any of them have probably any clue about this blog but I just thought that people needed to be told confidentially first. Anyways all sorted now... I've landed a local - well as local as my old long term job and current assignment - i.e. about 40 mile commute - IT project manager role with a well known and respected company. It'll remove the stress of wondering where the next assignment will be and no longer have to face any weekly or long term working away from home. It isn't that there is any problem with my current employer, nice company, lovely people and interesting work for the most part but I just hated the being...

After the row that the last post ended with I opened up to someone I knew where I work in our occupational health department. She was brilliant and she helped me get into a rehab. I didn't really research it or think about it I just knew I needed to go somewhere and get someone to help me. I still think I wanted to drink normally really. When I got to the rehab I was totally lost and confused. We shared dorms, we had to do "chores" we were expected to have a group meeting before breakfast then in group therapy sessions and other sessions throughout the day and in the evening do "step work" ready for group etc. You were locked out of the dorm for 14 hours or so a day forcing you to interact with the others so that you could never isolate. I was cut off pretty much from my family apart from a call home in the evening and them visiting once a week on a Sunday for lunch. My wife decided to never bring my daughter who was 8 at the time. All that was very heartbrea...

So it’s all been a bit hectic recently... I think this’ll continue until Christmas probably. Still it’s good really isn’t it? Firstly this weekend was our daughters 14th birthday. That meant a night out with a load of her friends at the local ice rink, me cooking a Chinese meal with her for Saturday night and then a big meal out and going to the cinema to see Christmas Carol on Sunday. BTW I thought the Christmas Carol was really good, the animation was stunningly good and they kept really true to the Dickens story - worth seeing. She got a load of presents that she wanted including the web cam we’d promised her – in fact I’d bought 2 of the same one so we could install one on the family computer as well. So Sunday morning ended up with us waving at each other in different rooms in the house on web cams... at times like these I wonder why we bother with technology. Oh no I remember one thing is so that hopefully we can have the odd web cam waving session with our son in Wales... w...

Yes very funny... the punch line inside of the one on the left is.. "...'Cos I'm your kid. And that's my job!"

The good news is that I'm feeling much better at the end of this week. Finally admitting to the problems I was happening and giving into my body telling me to take it easy has obviously been the best result. I had an ear test at the hospital today as part of the vertigo investigations. They could compare it with the test I had 4 years ago when I first had real issues with the vertigo. The result was that my right ear has an almost identical result - that is the one that has the worse hearing loss in it, I blame the big band jazz band I played in for a couple of years - I stood normally far stage right as you look at it and therefore my right ear was exposed to two drummers and a large row of saxophonists within feet of me! :-) The left ear, the side I have the tinitus and the side of my eye issues during my attacks however was actually slightly better than the previous result. That is to some point good news. If I have Meniere's then your hearing gets worse every attack on...

Yesterday (Tues 14th April) was the wife's birthday. We didn't do much although I had the day off work, just headed to Bluewater, well it is my daughters favourite place. I bought my wife a new phone for her birthday... guess what? She can't hear that one either!!! My daughter is the same - you ring and ring and it's buried in it's "sock" in the handbag and they are gassing to each other etc. If she ever phones me and it goes to voicemail she is straight on my case as to "Where were you?" etc. Still I suppose some of that is a lifetime of distrust of an alcohlic. My wife is popular, several friends called around later in the day with gifts and cards for her. She is lucky... I'm lucky too.